The Ascent

Synopsis

Two Soviet partisans leave their starving band to get supplies from a nearby farm. The Germans have reached the farm first, so the pair must go on a journey deep into occupied territory, a voyage that will also take them deep into their souls.

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The Ascent, director Larisa Shepitko’s final film and said to be one of the finest war films ever made, is a bleak and harrowing masterpiece of genuine gut-wrenching power. It is a story of survival, sacrifice and betrayal that captures the fragility, ugliness and greatness of man. It is rare for a film to genuinely match its vertiginous reputation yet The Ascent not only meets but transcends expectation delivering a searing study of humanity during a period of unimaginable darkness.

The film follows two Russian partisans as they search for food in the inhospitable surroundings of Nazi occupied Belarus. With no easy food in sight the two desperate men go further into dangerous territory putting not only their own lives…

Japan and Roberto Rossellini were two of the three parties around the world that reached an unprecedented level of humanism in war-themed manifestos. The third party was the Soviet Union. This classification in no way intends to diminish the many facets of war and its overwhelming power at transforming the human soul. On the contrary, my statement is aimed specifically towards humanism war testaments. If the situation forced us to narrow down Japan to one single filmmaker, then the colossal The Human Condition (1959-1961) would pop out from a sea of masterpieces, and Kobayashi would reign supreme. This is, of course, not official,…

Larisa Shepitko's depiction of humanity in the grip of war left me shaken, a shell of my former self! Feeling weak my psyche spent, a truly humbling experience to witness a man Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) facing death and do so with such extraordinary grace, integrity and honor!

The tight shots of Sotnikov's face with an almost christ like aura about him was as haunting as it was beautiful!

The final moments in this incredible film are some of the most devastating i've ever experienced in a film, so full of self-hatred and soul-crushing personal torment that so deeply affected me. War is fucked up. Not sure what else to say, seek out this extremely powerful, grim and very human war film, or not if you don't want to feel completely miserable.

Goes beyond words. The end is some of the rawest and wildest shit I have ever seen. This film is the bible. It starts one place and by the end, it has assaulted the viewer with its harrowing atmosphere and haunting camerawork that forever will be imprinted in my mind. Where it leaves the characters was the absolutely worst thing that could have happened to my sleep.

Luminous at hallucinatory pitch, delirious from cold, from illness, from pain, from hunger, what confirms and what distracts. Landscape of earth, what can be read there and in the faces of its inhabitants? Pushed to the isolate torment of collaboration or the crown of martyrdom, war is a stain, a scar upon the earth and upon the souls of those beings overtaken by war. Have snow-covered trees ever been so beautiful within a film?

Larisa Shepitko was the wife of Elem Klimov, director of Come and See. And with The Ascent you can tell that they were a match made in hell. The Ascent was a pure maddening, soul crushing, war film that leaves the audience in complete despair.

this film interweaves religious and political elements into its visual and narrative fabric in often unexpected ways (idk why, but this reminded me of Tarkovsky's Andrie Rublev, it has many similar compositions like in that film), throughout the film, Christian visual symbols and religious gestures are evoked, but most attention is paid to the transformation of Sotnikov, whose expression and demeanour change radically, along with the increasingly dramatic lighting and framing of his figure, lending him a nearly divine aura. the film's most important movement is when, Sotnikov decides to take on all responsibility to save the others, in this pivotal moment, Sotnikov’s defiant disclosure of identity is a decidedly political act of resistance, displaying loyalty to his Bolshevik ideals…

Saw this in high school, at high school, during gym; I skipped, and watched in the library, nobody ever questioned what we did on those computers, and it was extremely hot and this film seemed to help, but not really because it’s a monster that’ll tear you to pieces and force the concept of human fragility down your fucking throat.